For the better part of a decade, the alternatives industry was focused on answering the access questions:
- How do we get private investments in front of more investors?
- How do we expand distribution?
- How do we move alternatives from institutional-only to wealth management mainstream?
Now, those challenges are largely solved. Advisors have access to more alternative investment opportunities than at any point in history; new platforms, digital marketplaces and advisor-intermediated structures have dramatically widened the universe of available private market investments. Robert A. Stanger & Company reported that investors plowed $203.7 billion into U.S. alternative investments in 2025, up nearly 36% from the year before.
The centerpiece of the alternatives conversation has shifted from investor access to investor education.
The Advisor Is Still The Decision-Maker
Private markets are relationship-driven by nature. Unlike public securities, investors place enormous weight on the people guiding the recommendation.
An AssetMark survey of 400 U.S. financial advisors found that investor education ranked as one of the top three factors most likely to drive private markets adoption, cited by 50% of respondents, a data point that speaks to advisors as a trust layer rather than just a distribution channel. When investors feel confident about their understanding of an alternatives recommendation, they’re more likely to move forward.
Investors Want To Understand What They Own
As access to private markets opens up, more options create more complexity for investors, driving the need for context and understanding.
Investors want to know what the investment does, why it exists, what risks it introduces and how it fits alongside the rest of their portfolio. They want clarity on the manager’s background, process and track record.
Firms that communicate clearly build trust faster than the firms that simply distribute broadly.
Investor understanding is a competitive advantage. Managers who help advisors contextualize an opportunity and equip those advisors to have better conversations with their clients, tend to attract more capital over time than those who rely on pitch decks and performance summaries and expect advisors to fill in the gaps.
Investor understanding is a competitive advantage.
Discovery And Transparency Are Replacing Distribution
The old private markets model was built for a concentrated institutional client base that included a small number of relationships, a small number of touchpoints and a high-touch sales process.
But that model doesn’t scale into the wealth channel. In the United States alone, there were almost 16,000 RIAs in 2024, according to the SEC, providing asset management services to almost 60 million individual clients.
Private markets have traditionally been opaque, a structural reality of the asset class that is no longer viable in today’s landscape. Investors who are accustomed to researching public equities now expect comparable clarity when they evaluate private opportunities. They want to know how the fund is valued, what the liquidity terms are, what fees look like and what the realistic range of outcomes is.
To drive capital growth in this environment, firms need to build discovery infrastructure across content, educational resources and digital experiences that help advisors find the right opportunities for specific client objectives.
Education Is The New Competitive Advantage
The alternatives industry has done a remarkable job building new structures, lowering minimums and expanding access, work that drove growth and adoption up until now. But the next chapter will be defined by how well the industry closes the education gap between what’s available and what advisors and investors understand.
The next chapter will be defined by how well the industry closes the education gap.
At 1776ing, that’s the problem we’re built to solve: empower advisors, empower investors and empower private markets to be both accessible and genuinely understandable in practice.
Access may have defined the last decade of alternatives. Transparency, education and alignment will define the next one.
Sean O’Toole is CEO of 1776ing.
This article is published under WSR’s partner program and was not written by WSR’s staff or editors. For more information on how to participate in the partner program, contact zack.drew@wealthsolutionsreport.com. Views expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of WSR.
